Managing the hedgerows here is one of the most important things for us to get right. Tall hedgerows with wide bases provide food and shelter for all sorts of wildlife as well as being essential corridors linking habitats. Hedges support up to 80% of our woodland birds, 50% of our mammals and 30% of our butterflies as well as much other invertebrate life.

But in order to stay as a hedge rather than growing up into trees, the occasional cut is required. Hawthorn and Blackthorn only flower on old wood, so if only a third of the hedgerow is cut each year, it will then be just this third that will not flower and produce fruit the next season. Butterfly Conservation, however, argue that hedges should be cut less often than that, and only then in the late winter, to allow the many invertebrates that overwinter on the wood to complete their life cycles.

We use a nearby and reliably good agricultural contractor and this week a large green and yellow John Deere tractor arrived in the meadows to trim back our hedges:

Although we have a kilometre of hedge here, only half of it is actively managed. The other half has not been cut for decades and is now so overgrown and ivy-clad that it can no longer be cut with a flail head on a tractor. This is an unhealthy state for any hedge to be in and bits have already started falling over, but it is still producing a lot of fruit as well as offering all manner of safe places for invertebrates to overwinter.

Five years ago we planted an 85m stretch of mixed native hedgerow and it has already started to bear fruit. I am still annually pruning this with secateurs to encourage it bush out.

The remaining half a kilometre of hedgerow is cut with a flail head every other year:

The flail head rotates at 3,000 rpm and the cut vegetation is munched up into tiny bits and effectively disappears as mulch into the hedgerow rather than needing to be cleared up.

It is always a slightly shocking sight to see it in the meadows.

The heavy tractor makes quite a mess of the soft January ground:

The hedgerow took six hours to cut this week. Although we do need to give the contractors enough work to justify the trip over here, perhaps the job could be divided into two, or maybe even three, sections in the future to be done on successive years. In this way we would be achieving the rotation recommended as best practice to manage the hedgerows for wildlife.

Dave and I are part of the Walmer Castle volunteer wildlife team, monitoring and recording the wildlife there, as well as helping with the wildlife walks of the grounds that are put on for visitors to the Castle.

These days the Castle is open to the public as well as being the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. It is also a historic garden and the National Collection of Greatorex double snowdrops has its home there. Other snowdrop varieties are grown as well and some of these are already out in flower and being displayed in the kitchen garden for us to admire:

The snowdrops had even attracted a hoverfly in the weak January sunshine:

Last week we went down into one of the tunnels under the Castle to see what butterflies and moths might be hibernating there.

We didn’t find any hibernating butterflies down there but we did find three species of moth. Only a very small minority (2%) of British moths hibernate as adults and the herald is one of few that does. Its larval foodplants are willows and poplars and there aren’t many of those trees around here, so it was nice to see two heralds in the Walmer Castle tunnel this week:

There were also three twenty-plume moths. The caterpillars of these moths feed on the leaves and buds of honeysuckle:

In March 2023 I found one of these moths in the house. The light from the alarm box shining through its wings showed what an odd structure they are:

I also found six Bloxworth snouts down in the tunnels. Until recently this was only a very rare immigrant to mainland Britain, but has became established along the south coast and now seems to be spreading inland. The moth got its common name from being first discovered on an outhouse door at Bloxworth rectory in Dorset in 1884:

There are two generations each year, the first flying in July and August, and the second in September and October. It is this second brood that will overwinter as adults in tunnels where the temperature is more stable. The larvae feed mostly on pellitory-of-the-wall, Parietaria judaica, which is a plant that grows plentifully amongst the Castle’s stonework.

A graph from the Kent Moth Group website shows sightings of the Bloxworth snout in Kent over time:

We also saw the egg sac of a cave spider, Meta menardi, dangling on a 5cm silken thread from the roof:

This crow has been named Russell (ie Russell Crowe) by the English Heritage staff at the drawbridge where it regularly hangs out on the battlements:

The kestrels are also still being seen most days in the trees flanking the Castle drive:

A family of sparrowhawks were raised in the Castle grounds last summer and we think we have found the large nest:

Back home, this rather ramshackle bowl of bulbs is what is left of the forced hyacinths, especially prepared so that they flowered at Christmas. They are well past their best and have now gone outside to die back before being planted out into the garden in the autumn:

In accordance with instructions, I planted the bulbs into the bowl in early September and left them outside until the beginning of December, at which point they came into the warmth of the house. During this sojourn outside, though, a jay must have buried a walnut in there and this started to grow as soon as the bowl was brought inside.

It was a bumper year for our neighbours’ walnut tree and we saw both crows and magpies making the most of the bonanza:

We only saw jays with acorns, however:

But it is only the jays that will bury nuts away in the soil to feed themselves through the winter.

I extracted the fledgling walnut tree from the pot of hyacinths….

…and put it in its own deep pot to plant out once it has matured a bit more.

There has been a lot of tawny owl activity in the meadows of late. One night this one was on a perch…

…and this photo was taken shortly afterwards. What is going on?

The obvious explanation is that the bird was defecating – but surely that would have been a fast expulsion and so why isn’t it blurry? This remains a bit of a question mark for me.

It is fox mating season, when the males start shadowing the vixens to claim them for themselves and I am seeing pairs of foxes on cameras throughout the meadows. In the photo below, there is also a very brightly lit ship out to sea in the top right hand corner:

It is The Patricia, who anchored alongside us one night this week. Operated by Trinity House, she maintains the buoys and lightship that guard the notorious Goodwin Sands just offshore from the meadows. I have covered the Goodwin Sands in more detail in this previous post: https://walmermeadows.co.uk/2024/05/12/walking-on-the-goodwins/

We last saw her back in November working on the Mew Stone buoys in South Devon when we were on holiday there. Now happily on the other side of midwinter, it feels very right that we are both safely back in Kent.

I think that there’s a lot to like about January. The days are already noticeably getting longer and the brand new year, full of promise, is just beginning. Snowdrops are such elegant harbingers of spring and are now poking their heads up through the soil, guaranteed to lift one’s spirits on a dull winter’s day.

It is also the month when we pay our first visit of the year to Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey. We were there with our son Jonty and daughter-in-law Ellie this week, staying for the first time in the two new cabins overlooking the marsh:

We have been regularly visiting this 3,300 acre marshland which was once farmed but is now a nature reserve of international importance. Large flocks of waders and wildfowl spend the winter there and the short-eared owls and marsh harrier roost are big attractions at this time of year.

Unfortunately a strong and bitter northerly wind got up soon after we arrived, but at least it was dry.

There is a table of interesting nature finds in the cow byre. Some teeny weeny nests here..

…and some grass snake skins:

There are about seven pairs of barn owls that are resident at Elmley and between them in 2024 they raised 40 owlets. However, 2025 was presumably a bad vole year and not a single barn owl chick successfully fledged on the reserve. Towards dusk we went on a guided nature tour where we saw some of Elmley’s barn owls:

A veritable herd of coots was grazing the grasses:

Several thousand lapwing are overwintering on the reserve and they have already started displaying. But courtship was definitely not on the mind of this lapwing below, as it stoically stood with its back to the wind:

A sweet little house sparrow:

It was an exceptional berry year in 2025 and the hawthorn trees on the reserve were still red with uneaten haws even now in the middle of January:

In the previous two winters, twenty to thirty short-eared owls have roosted on the ground in a scrubby area by the car park. Some of these were owls that had fledged in the Arctic where there is no darkness at all in the summer and the birds are therefore accustomed to being out in the daylight. They were delighting visitors by appearing during the afternoon.

This year, however, very few short-eared owls have arrived into the UK to spend the winter and it is thought that there are only a maximum of seven owls in the field by the car park. As well as that, they don’t seem to be Arctic-fledged birds and are generally not appearing until it is dark.

As we finished our dusk tour, it was very nearly dark and we did see two short-eared owls fly out over our heads and away.

Over the course of the day we had actually built up a reasonable tally of bird species, but the views of them weren’t terribly good in poor light and strong winds.

The next morning the weather had improved significantly and we even managed an al fresco breakfast whilst watching three marsh harriers scour the marshes.

Dave and I had to leave soon after breakfast but Jonty and Ellie stayed on and walked down to the hides. When they returned to the car park, the nature guide showed them a short-eared owl that was sitting on a grass tussock by the car park and a barn owl that was flying over, so they were very pleased with that.

Elmley doesn’t really have enough trees for tawny owls. The meadows don’t have many trees either but there has been a lot of tawny activity here this week, with owls on the perches most nights:

There has also been a most unwelcome visitor:

One afternoon we were very surprised to see an adult slow worm lying out in the open on the path:

Cold blooded slow worms need to hibernate over the winter because there is not enough heat to warm their blood. This animal was alive but extremely torpid and we suppose it had been plucked out from its hibernation by a corvid. It had also just lost the end of its tail which is probably how it escaped its predator’s clutches.

Our daughter Lizzie and her partner Sheff have just returned from two weeks in Japan.

This is a forest of mōsō bamboo, Phyllostachys edulis, in Arashiyama. This giant timber bamboo is native to China and Taiwan but is now widely found in Japan. It can reach heights of up to 28m and grows as much as 119 cm in twenty-four hours. Bamboo torture and execution was reportedly used in Japan in the Second World War where a bamboo shoot from a fast-growing species such as this grows through the body of a victim who was tied over it. Such claims lack reliable evidence however.

This information board was showing what fish were to be found in a lake that they visited:

I don’t know what any of these species are but there do seem to be rather a lot of them.

And finally for this brief foray into Japanese nature-related things, Lizzie became obsessed with Hokkaido milk whilst she was there. The Hokkaido climate and lush pastures are ideal for dairy farming and the area produces over 60% of the country’s milk, which is rich and creamy and with a slightly higher fat content than is normal:

She enjoyed it so much and is sad to discover that this milk is not available in the UK.

They seem to have had a marvellous time in Japan but now they are home and they too can start spotting things to be positive about in a British January.

This week we have had several days of gloriously sunny but icy weather. The sun shone out of blue skies but in this bleak midwinter the earth stood hard as iron and water was like a stone. Two or three days in and we realised that the animals were really thirsty:

We broke up the inch-thick ice on the ponds to expose some liquid water:

I walked down to this pond shortly afterwards and a flock of small birds rose from where they had been drinking at the broken ice. I felt so guilty that we hadn’t thought of doing this sooner but from then on we started regularly breaking up the ice on the ponds. A dish of water also went out at dusk with the peanuts for the foxes and badgers to drink.

Over the years we have noticed that snipe always arrive in the meadows in cold snaps such as these. We don’t know where they are normally spending the winter but we do know that they will inevitably turn up here once the temperature drops down low.

As expected, we started flushing snipe as we walked round with the dog this week and there were at least eight of them. The problem is that, not only are they are very well disguised, they are also very jittery. They fly up and off whilst we are still some distance away and we never get a proper look at them.

Determined to try to get a photo this year, I collected together five trail cameras from their duties elsewhere and trained them on an area that the snipe seemed to be repeatedly returning to:

Throwing trail cameras at the problem is the way that I have historically tackled such a challenge. One of them did indeed get a photo of the snipe:

Dave then came up with a much better solution. Using our new thermal imaging camera, he could pinpoint where the snipe had hunkered down whilst he remained a considerable distance away. He could then use his birding scope with a phone attached to take a photo from afar.

A small group of pheasants seem to be spending the entire winter with us this year and are appearing on trail cameras throughout the meadows. We think there are five of them including one male. It is actually surprising that this has never happened before:

We had a busy Christmas with some of the family here to help us celebrate. In preparation for the big day, our daughter-in-law Ellie brought some rosemary and sage in from the allotment to decorate a candlestick. She found some rosemary beetles on the rosemary.

When Ellie turned her attention to the sage, she found a couple of these odd-looking invertebrates:

I photographed them and scurried off to try to ID them.

Rather satisfyingly, they turned out to be the larvae of the rosemary beetles. I have found the adults on both rosemary and lavender before but didn’t know that they were also using the large sage bush in the allotment.

In the quiet days following Christmas we have spent several sessions working in the wood. All the dogwood has now been cut down and cleared from the marjoram glade and we can await its wonders in a few months time. We are now concentrating on extending another clearing that we started last year. We ran out of time last winter and hadn’t made the clearing large enough to properly get it out of the shade of the surrounding trees.

This large coppice is to the south of the new clearing and had to come down since it was casting long shadows across it. There is still a need for some final tidying up because the chainsaw ran out of battery, but it is now more or less happily dealt with:

Meanwhile the trail cameras in the wood have also been in action:

On one chilly morning we went to have a poke around Walmer Castle grounds to see what we could find:

One of our fellow volunteer wildlife team members had pointed us in the direction of an interesting fungus and I wanted to photograph it with my macro lens:

The scarlet caterpillar club fungus, Cordyceps militaris, takes over an underground butterfly or moth larvae or pupae and grows inside it, filling it with mycelium. Eventually a bright orange fruiting body emerges out of the head of the caterpillar or pupa and grows up to the surface of the soil.

Below is a Wiki Commons photo where the soil has been cut away to reveal the pupa:

This fungus has been used for centuries in Chinese medicine and is also eaten in soups and other dishes in the Far East

We were very charmed by a tame robin hanging around at Walmer castle:

This green crab spider, Diaea dorsata, was lurking in a male mistletoe flower:

Peering through the glass into the greenhouse, we could see a seven-spot ladybird that had chosen a very sensible, protected place on a cactus to see out the winter:

It was cold and there was very little about, but we did see a white wagtail up on the bastions of the castle:

And a pair of kestrels have often been spotted in the mature trees around the drawbridge of late, thrilling the English Heritage staff who stand there to welcome guests to the castle. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these birds found somewhere to nest in the castle walls?

I am delighted to be able to show you some fantastic bird photos taken from around the world by friends of our daughter-in-law who are also readers this blog. Joe and Sophie have recently moved to Vancouver in Canada and this photo of a male Anna’s hummingbird was taken there in April. These beautiful little birds are apparently to be seen on hummingbird feeders around Vancouver all year round and Joe and Sophie have even seen them from their flat. I am very envious:

And this is a juvenile Anna’s hummingbird seen on Vancouver Island in September:

Now that Dave and I no longer fly, we are never going to see a bald eagle in the wild like this one. This wonderfully atmospheric photo was taken at the George C Reifel reserve in Vancouver:

The pink robin is native to Southeastern Australia and they saw this male in Tasmania in March:

They were also in Borneo in March to climb Malaysia’s highest mountain, Mount Kinabalu, when they saw this indigo flycatcher with a fly in its beak:

But before they even left for Canada, they took this photo of a short-eared owl when visiting Elmley Nature Reserve here in Kent:

She was a bit of a battle axe in many ways, but I have fond nostalgic memories of my paternal grandmother making marmalade in her kitchen in Maidenhead when I was a child. She was of a generation that had lived through both World Wars and everything was cooked from scratch and was generally simple but delicious. Although I have to say that I was not a fan of the cow intestines from the butcher that she would boil up as dinner for the dogs, filling the house with the most revolting smell.

With Granny Hart very much in mind, we set about making our own marmalade this week.

Simmering away on the hob for many hours, this made the house smell deliciously citrusy and is definitely now set to become a January tradition.

This is the concluding part of the review, covering the highlights from last year for both the mammals and the invertebrates of the meadows.

Mammals

I start with a photo that I like of a fox looking really alert and wild:

This is another favourite 2025 photo of mine, an action shot of a fox and a rabbit. The fox’s tail looks so very long:

In May, we were away with the dog for a while and the meadows lay undisturbed. This fact did not go unnoticed by the foxes, who took the opportunity to park their cubs here while they went off to find them food. There was a single cub at the top of the second meadow:

This is its mother, with obvious signs that she is feeding young:

The cub has been given a headless rabbit by a parent here:

A bit further down the slope there was a second family:

These four cubs spent a lot of time chilling out while they waited for their parents to bring them food:

They were very adorable:

There was a third family of cubs on the cliff in front of the house as well. We returned to find innocent and inexperienced fox cubs wandering around everywhere:

This was a real headache because of the dog. Although she is not really a hunter, she was unable to resist such easy targets. We started putting her on a lead whenever she went out but, within two days of our return, all of the cubs had anyway been removed from the meadows by their parents. I suppose they judged that this was no longer a safe place for them to be. It was quite sobering to have such categorical evidence of the negative impact we can sometimes have on the wildlife here.

A fox with one or several rodents in its mouth:

A few years ago, foxes were climbing up into this pear tree below to get at the pears. This autumn they stayed on the ground, but they still removed most of the low-hanging fruit. Foxes really love pears:

This lovely fox that we call Tripod was not able to put any weight on his right front leg all year. It must have badly affected his ability to hunt prey and, consequently, he was an enthusiastic partaker of the nightly peanuts, often coming up close to the house towards dusk to hurry me along:

I had hoped that his leg would eventually get better but that doesn’t seemed to have happened. Despite everything, though, he seems to be doing alright and he ends the fox section of this review.

There is a badger sett dug into the steep cliff just below the meadows and we have been closely following the fortunes of its badgers for the last decade.

Badgers are masters of relaxation:

Although it is very normal to see the badgers together at the peanuts, I have never seen them out foraging as a pack before:

They are such great housekeepers. Old bedding is dragged out of the sett, as on the left below, and fresh clean hay is brought in to replace it, as on the right:

At the beginning of April, a single cub appeared above ground:

As normal, the adult male was not allowed near the cub for a while. Even once he was, he seemed to be alarmingly rough with the little thing:

The mortality rate in badger cubs is shockingly high with about 60% not surviving their first year. Most of these starve once their mother stops suckling them. This is particularly the case in dry summers when earthworms, which would normally make up 80% of their diet, are difficult to reach because the ground is hard and the worms have gone down deep. In the drought summer of 2022 all four of the badger cubs here died. In 2025, however, it was better news and the single cub survived the summer.

There were two other mammal species of note last year. A weasel was going backwards and forwards across this gate throughout the year:

And there were two separate sightings of a stoat. On both occasions it was seen at the top of the second meadow close to where we see the rabbits:

Invertebrates

There is something about photographs of butterflies on beautiful flowers that is so elevating to the spirits in the depths of winter and I will get the invertebrate section started with some of these.

The sunny and hot weather last year had a very positive impact on the butterflies here. A wall butterfly on hawthorn:

After several years of worrying about them, green hairstreaks finally had a good year:

There was enough kidney vetch around to keep the small blues happy:

Small blue egg-laying into a kidney vetch flower:

Small coppers are very susceptible to variation and in fact there are 140 named aberrations that occur in the UK. This small copper, with those additional metallic blue spots in front of the orange bars on its hind wings is showing the most common aberration called caeruleopunctata:

Marbled whites and all three skipper species that we see here also had good years:

Soon after we moved to the meadows we planted some alder buckthorn saplings and, although they are not trees of chalk downland, they seem to be doing alright. We wanted them here because they are the larval foodplant of the brimstone butterfly and every year we are delighted to see brimstone caterpillars on the leaves:

I have an ongoing project to try to encourage adonis and chalkhill blues to the meadows. Both of these butterflies use horseshoe vetch as their sole larval foodplant and I now have a lot of this plant growing well in the meadows:

We also have the other flowering plants such as knapweed and scabious that the adults like to nectar up on. Both of these butterflies have a symbiotic relationship with ants and I presume that we have the right ant species. Now all that is needed is for the butterflies themselves to discover this fantastic habitat that I have been busily creating for them. This hasn’t happened yet but I remain ever optimistic.

My enthusiasm for moths was reignited in a big way last year. Peach blossom, below, was just one of the 178 species of macro-moths that I recorded in the meadows and what a beautiful moth it is:

It’s always exciting to have a Sussex emerald in the trap because they are rare and localised, favouring wild carrot growing on shingle beaches as their larval foodplant. One morning I had four of them in my trap:

In July the Kent county micro-moth recorder came to the meadows and went through my moth trap with me. This gave me the confidence to start trying to identify micro-moths as well as the macros, instead of just ignoring them on the basis that they are too difficult and I didn’t have the time. This turned out to be very rewarding and I ended the year with 70 species of micro-moth on my list. There are around 2,000 micro-moth species in the UK, though, and I am hoping my tally will increase greatly in 2026.

It is endlessly fascinating to spend time researching the lifecycles of the moths in the trap and the plants that they rely on. The larvae of the rare Bugloss ermine, for example, feed on vipers bugloss, a plant that likes to grow on shingle beaches and consequently loves it around here:

In August I bought a battery-powered moth trap which I can now use to catch moths in the second meadow:

The meadows, looking out towards France as they do, are well placed to record immigrant moths coming across from Continental Europe, such as this four-spotted footman in the trap in September:

There are often other things found in the trap as well as moths. This strange-looking creature with its antennae coming out halfway along its snout is either an acorn weevil (Curculio glandium) or a nut weevil (Curculio nucum). To tell the difference I’d have needed to get a much better look at the end of its antennae:

Not all moths fly at night and there are some beautiful moths to be seen out in the sunshine with the butterflies:

I did see a new day-flying moth in July last year. The carrot-seed moth, Sitochroa palealis, is a moth of coastal areas in the south of England which uses wild carrot as its larval foodplant. In September we also found its caterpillars enclosed within the seed purses of wild carrot. The adult and caterpillar are shown below:

Below is the caterpillar of the camomile shark moth, spotted on an ox-eye daisy in June. The adult is quite a drab-looking moth but its caterpillars are quite the opposite and feed on various plants in the daisy family including camomile from whence they got their common name:

In January there was a small army of Luffia moth larvae grazing on lichen on the slate roof of an insect hotel. They have the most fascinating lifecycle – other than in Cornwall, there are only female Luffia moths and no males at all are involved in producing the young. The larvae develop from eggs without them needing to be fertilised. As well as that, the adult female Luffia moths are flightless and distribution is thought to be by wind:

The mothing year had its grande finale in mid September when Dave was hacking back a hedge from a telegraph pole in preparation for a visit by Openreach. He found a simply enormous convolvulus hawkmoth on the pole that had previously been covered by dense vegetation.

Since we were responsible for it no longer being safely hidden from the birds, we took it into safekeeping before releasing it at dusk:

Every year I attempt to get a decent photo of the delightful hairy-footed flower bees that visit my pots of ‘shrimps-on-the-barbie’ pulmonaria in the garden every April. To increase my chances I must have about seven pots of it now:

Despite my best efforts over several years, I am aware that I have only really scratched the surface with my knowledge of the invertebrates that live in the meadows. Here are some of the new discoveries I made in 2025:

Ruby-tailed wasps are often to be found hanging around the bee nesting boxes on the side of the shed, hoping to get an opportunity to lay their own eggs into the nest of a hard-working mason bee. There are several similar species of these wasps, though, and my photos had never been good enough to properly identify them. This photograph, though, taken by a visitor with a good macro camera was clear enough to identify it as Chrysura radians, a kleptoparasite of the red mason bee:

I saw this ornate-tailed digger wasp, Cerceris rybyensis, sheltering from the rain at the end of July:

I was so excited to see these tiny (2.5 to 3mm) ant-mimicking flies, Sepsis fulgens, below. They were mating at a badger latrine and the female will then lay her eggs into the badger dung. These flies are mimicking ants as a protection from potential predators who avoid ants because they can be unpalatable or aggressive:

Another fly is the four-banded bee-grabber, Conops quadrifasciatus:

A visitor to the meadows in August is interested in weevils and found us this armadillo weevil, Otiorhynchus armadillo:

Ladybirds seemed to do very well last year and I saw some species that I’d never seen before. The adonis ladybird on the left, the orange ladybird, known for feeding on mildew on sycamores rather than on the more usual aphids, top right and the checkered form of the ten-spot ladybird below it:

We also had a really good dragonfly year. This four-spotted chaser, seen emerging from the hide pond in June, was a new species for the meadows:

August is the time of year when we start looking out for wasp spiders amongst the tall vegetation. These large spiders are grasshopper specialists, building their webs low to the ground in the hope that one might jump in:

When we discover one of the webs, we watch it to see what prey the spider is catching. There have been all manner of unfortunate things that wind up in the webs but never a dragonfly before. Its wings have been wrapped in silken threads with its body arching over the top:

The most wasp spiders we have previously seen in any year is four. Last year, however, we did a more systematic search and found 149! Perhaps 2025 was an extraordinary year for wasp spiders or maybe we had just not looked properly before.

The year concluded with a final flourish for the meadows. Just before Christmas we had the wonderful news that, with much help from Kent Wildlife Trust, they have now been officially designated as a Local Wildlife Site, as an extension to the existing Kingsdown and Walmer Beach Local Wildlife Site. Although nothing much will change as a result, it is recognition of what a special place they are and I am looking forward to seeing what 2026 brings.

The UK experienced its sunniest spring and warmest summer on record in 2025, with challenging multiple heatwaves and high temperatures. East Kent is one of the driest parts of England, but thankfully this year we had just enough rainfall during the summer to keep the ponds ticking over and stop the vegetation from dying back, allowing the invertebrates to complete their lifecycles.

Birds of the Meadows

For several years now, we have been trying to do our bit for swifts and establish a breeding colony here in the meadows. It was a slow start but finally, in 2024, two swift chicks successfully fledged from a box attached to the side of the house. This was wonderful but, when the birds then departed for Africa at the end of July, we were very aware that the situation was precarious – our infant colony depended upon the two adult birds flying 4,000 miles down to equatorial Africa, both surviving the winter and then flying another 4,000 miles back again. What were the chances that we would ever see them again?

At the beginning of May 2025 we were on the south coast of France and spent some time with a group of cool young French people at a lofty watchpoint at Leucate where they were recording the birds arriving across the Mediterranean and into Europe. They were keeping a tally board and we could see that, by 2nd May, 121,931 swifts (Martinet noir) had already flown in over their heads. Some of these should hopefully have been continuing up through France and onwards to England.

When we got back home from France on 5th May, it was an immense relief to discover that our pair of swifts had arrived back before us and were overnighting in the box:

They took some time recovering from their journey and it was not until 22nd May that the first egg was laid, the second following two days later:

The birds then took it in turns to incubate the eggs whilst the other went out to feed. Both always spent the night together in the box though.

Then, on 11th June, just as we were once more leaving home for a holiday in Shetland, a cracked egg indicated that one or both of the chicks had hatched:

We returned on 22nd June and the two youngsters seemed to be doing very well in the box:

However, there was a problem – it quickly became apparent that this was now a single parent family with just one adult bringing them food:

Luckily the weather stayed fair in July which was good for flying insects levels, and the chicks seemed to thrive despite their loss:

On the 20th July one of the young birds was stretching out its wings in the box and preparing to launch:

When I next looked at the camera, it had fledged and just one chick remained in the box:

It took another four days for this second chick to build up the courage to leave the box but, by 7am on 24th July, the box was empty and it was all over for another year.

What will happen next year remains to be seen. We are already one adult down and the four chicks that have fledged from the box over the last two years are still too young to breed. I await next May with some trepidation.

However, there are some other promising leads for the development of our swift colony. The thermal camera showed that another pair of swifts were spending the nights in a neighbouring box. These were probably two year old birds that had chosen a partner and a nest site and, all being well, will be back next year to breed:

The boxes were also visited by swift ‘bangers’ in mid July. These are immature birds that are prospecting for vacant nest sites by banging on the box to see if they get a response:

Finally, we now have two new swift boxes installed in the wildlife tower on the garage. We were playing calls from these boxes in 2025 when the swifts were in the country and this was getting a lot of response with birds often circling the tower:

We haven’t seen one go in yet but we will try again this year.

The kestrels have had a busy year here in the meadows and have had the odd drama themselves.

The female kestrel is the grande dame of the meadows, having been ringed here as a young bird six years ago, and she has been here ever since.

She often gets bothered by the magpies who don’t want her around:

We have seen both her and her mate catch many rodents throughout the year, but particularly in the autumn once the meadows were cut:

She has also caught a variety of other prey such as bumblebees, newts and lizards. In 2025 she seemed to do particularly well with great green bush-crickets:

These bush-crickets are large and must be quite a good meal for her:

In mid August we saw what must surely be a juvenile kestrel. I have always presumed that our pair of kestrels nest in the nearby chalk cliffs and this might well be one of their young:

In October after the meadows were cut, we were seeing so much of the kestrels that Dave decided to try to digiscope them. This was when we realised that our leading lady had something very wrong with her eye:

I have to admit that I thought that this was going to be the end of her because how could she judge distances and effectively hunt with only one eye? But, whatever this was, it was thankfully quite short lived and within the week she was back to normal.

We have often heard both male and female tawny owls calling out in the meadows. This tawny has caught itself a mouse….

….and here is one with a rat:

2024 was a very good year for barn owls in the meadows. We saw less of them in 2025 but they do pose really nicely for the camera:

Another raptor was frequently seen in the autumn:

In my opinion magpies are far too successful here. Three chicks fledged this spring:

They are omnivores with a varied diet and it is always interesting to see what they find to eat. This magpie has two mice in its beak:

And I was surprised at how many wasps they were eating in the autumn:

Crows do well too. There were a pair of chicks this year:

I enjoyed seeing them being fed on the perches:

All sorts of food was going into the mouths of the chicks including seed and spiders.

Like the magpies they also have a wide diet and perhaps this is one of the reasons they both seem to flourish:

I had to also include this photo of a crow wearing a black tutu:

In mid June I was alerted to a tremendous furore outside the open backdoor. On investigation, I saw that a just-fledged blue tit had flown into the lobby by mistake and its anxious family were all calling for it outside:

The remains of the gape were still very evident at the sides of its beak:

I was easily able to gather the sweet little bird up in my hands and return it to its family who were still waiting for it by the door.

A juvenile cuckoo stayed in the meadows for two or three days in mid July on its way south to Africa for the winter. This was one of the absolute bird highlights of the year:

In August a spotty young green woodpecker was pecking around the garden path:

At the beginning of 2025 our meadow bird list stood at 98 species. It had been there, teetering on the brink of its century, since October 2023 when barn owl had been added. In April this year, John and John, the bird ringers, were trying out whoosh netting in the meadows:

While the ringers were the meadows whoosh netting, they heard a Mediterranean gull which went onto the list at 99. Then, when we were in Shetland in June, John saw a male golden oriole fly over the meadows. This was an amazing 100th bird to add to the list although it is a shame we hadn’t seen it ourselves of course.

A male golden oriole on the left, photo by Kookaburra 81 on Wiki Commons CCA-SA 4.0 and a turtle dove, Europe’s only long distance migratory dove, on the right, photo by El Golli Mohamed on Wiki Commons also under CCA-SA 4.0

The meadows used to be part of Operation Turtle Dove, a project set up to address the terrible decline in turtle doves in the UK. But, after three years of supplementary feeding for turtle doves and not having seen one, we didn’t want to spend any more of their money on seed and withdrew from the scheme. So it was therefore an amazing moment when, on 25th June, we finally heard a turtle dove purring in a holm oak by the wild pond. This was the 101st bird species for the meadows. Although I quickly redeployed several trail cameras to the pond in case it came down to drink, we unfortunately didn’t see the bird. It was only here for that one day but maybe it liked what it saw and will return in 2026.

John and John have also been ringing in the meadows using the more traditional method of mist netting. They caught seven species of warbler in just one session on 8th September. Since we were away these are their photos of lesser whitethroat, willow warbler, and chiffchaff and, below, garden warbler, female blackcap and male blackcap. They also caught reed warbler and common whitethroat. All these species will have been about to leave the country for the winter:

In November and December, John ringed seven firecrests in just three sessions. One of them was recaught three weeks later, suggesting that it is overwintering here.

The colourful top of a firecrest’s head:

The amazing firecrest finishes Part One of the annual review for the meadows. I have really enjoyed trawling through my 2025 posts to pull together the most interesting bird photos of the year – and what a year it has been. I will now repeat the process, but for the mammals and invertebrates photos that will make up Part Two, coming soon!

It is now six years since we took on twelve acres of lovely mixed woodland on the edge of the Barham Downs near Canterbury. We still have a lot to learn but every year we take a few steps forward in our understanding and appreciation of the place, and here are my highlights for 2025:

Green Woodpeckers

Green woodpeckers once more nested in the old cherry tree, using the same low hole that they dug out last year.

Before long, however, there was this worrying photo of an adult flying from the nest carrying what appears to be a complete egg:

At the end of May there was another unwelcome photo, this time of an adult carrying a chick out of the nest:

However, even with the removal of the egg and the chick, two demanding youngsters remained:

Then, very early one morning at the end of June, one of the young woodpeckers fledged out of the hole, stretching its wings into the big wide world for the very first time:

The remaining chick stayed in the tree for a couple more days…

…before it too left the nest. Unfortunately the trail camera failed to capture the second fledging.

The spotty juveniles were then seen on trail cameras throughout the wood for the next few weeks bringing another green woodpecker breeding season to a satisfactory conclusion:

Dormice

2025 was the first full year for which I have held a licence from Natural England to disturb dormice. I certainly got a lot of practice because there were good numbers of dormice in the boxes and they seem to have had a good year, in our wood at least. The wood is part of the National Dormouse Monitoring Programme and, by the last tour of the year in November, twenty-five of the thirty boxes had dormice nests in them. Most of these were unoccupied by then but at some point during the year all those twenty-five boxes had had a dormouse living in them.

There are often other interesting things found in the dormice boxes. A wren nest was in box 28:

The lid of box 3 was stuck down with a dense silken mesh and inside was a labyrinth spider, Angelena labyrinthica. These very large spiders build big funnel webs to catch their prey in low vegetation. But when it is time for the female to produce her egg sac, she will create a labyrinth of impenetrable webbing to protect the eggs. Unfortunately she sometimes chooses to do this in a dormouse nest box.

Yellow-necked mice will also sometimes nest in the dormice boxes. This pair had a nest with young in box 25

Every year we also find pygmy shrews living on the top of abandoned dormice nests:

Dormice are thought to drink dew from leaf surfaces in the early hours of the morning and also get moisture from their food of fruits, berries, flowers and insects. It is most unusual for them both to come down to ground level and to use ponds to drink, but this summer a trail camera was often catching them at one of the woodland ponds:

The Pond in the Marjoram Clearing

Before our time at the wood, water was only occasionally available in small pools that formed in the centre of some of the coppice stools. We rapidly dug two ponds, but both are in the heavy shade of the trees and have remained rather dank and lifeless. They do provide somewhere for birds and mammals to drink and bathe, but we also wanted a pond where a healthy freshwater ecosystem could establish to support the tadpoles of woodland amphibians.

In January 2023 we dug a new pond out in the open of a clearing where the marjoram grows. It has proved a popular destination for larger birds, but I think the smaller birds do still prefer the other ponds that are less exposed:

The first sign that amphibians have now started using the pond was when we saw a heron extracting a frog from it in early February:

I worried that perhaps the heron had eaten the only frog but, towards the end of February, it was exciting to see that the wood’s first ever clump of frogspawn had been laid. A momentous moment indeed:

However, unfortunately I don’t think that the resulting tadpoles fared very well this year. For a start, the weather was often hot and dry and the water level got very low. But something else rather wonderful happened as well – a tadpole predator took up residence under the corrugated green square, placed by the side of the pond to increase its water catchment area. This was the first time that I had ever seen a snake on a trail camera:

This is an awful photo but this pair of mallards, stopping in at the pond in April, were a new species for the wood:

I am delighted by the way that this small, simple pond has improved the habitat and biodiversity of the wood. Over the winter we are going to add another green square on the other side of it to increase its water-catching ability and hopefully improve the chances for the tadpoles next year.

Other Birds in the Wood

A dry spell at the beginning of the year allowed birds’ muck to accumulate under the stand of silver birch at the centre of the wood – a clear sign that the wood is still being used as a winter crow roost:

We feel very privileged to have tawny owls living in the wood:

Back in 2022 a pair of tawny owls nested in one of our owl boxes and fledged two young:

The tawnies did again show interest in the box this spring..

…but once more lost out to the squirrels. When the squirrels had finished with the box, a pair of stock doves moved in and raised two broods over the summer:

There has been bird ringing in the wood this year. Marsh tits have declined by 81% in the UK between 1967 and 2023, so the breeding population in the wood is very precious:

We know they are breeding here because a brood was successfully raised in dormouse box 12 last year:

I think the peanut feeder in our wood must bring in great spotted woodpeckers from far and wide because John often seems to get them in his net:

And bullfinch is another species of bird that breeds in the wood every year:

Other Mammals in the wood

Plenty of mammals live in the wood other than the dormice. Our part of the wood doesn’t contain a major badger sett, but we do still see plenty of badgers:

We also have a population of foxes. Back in 2022 the dog alerted us to an old rabbit burrow that was being used by a family of foxes. I immediately got a trail camera on it:

We have not been so fortunate since then although foxes are still clearly raising their cubs there:

The UK rabbit population has seen a major decline in recent years for several reasons including rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus. It is difficult to assess the number of rabbits currently living in the wood but unfortunately there don’t seem to be very many:

The rabbits are prey for the woodland’s resident population of foxes and buzzards. Occasional mustelids have also been seen this year who love to eat rabbit when they can:

Our trail cameras caught a mustelid several times in the second half of the year. None of the photos however were good enough to be able to identify it categorically as a polecat, a feral ferret or a hybrid between the two. Our woodland neighbour, however, did much better:

Invertebrates and Plants in the wood

I had long wanted to be able to run a moth trap in the wood and finally took the plunge and bought a battery-powered moth trap this year. In the event I only ran it there once but this is something that is very much on the agenda for 2026.

The Kent county recorder for micro moths visited the wood in October to survey it for leaf mines. Because there are so many different species of tree, he managed to record fifty-seven different species of moth leaf mines, often more than one species on a single leaf. He also found other signs of moth activity of which we had previously been totally unaware, such as the larval case of a bagworm on the left below and the tiny orange wood balls excavated by a cherry tree tortrix moth larva on the right:

It was all completely fascinating stuff and we hope to take great strides forward on the subject of woodland moths next year.

We are much more familiar with the butterflies that are to be found in the wood. The large and fabulous silver-washed fritillaries feed on the flowers growing in the marjoram clearing in July and August:

They earn the ‘silver-washed’ in their common name because of the coloration on the underside of their wings:

White admirals are also sizeable, although this one looks like it has had some near misses:

Another plant that grows very well in our wood at the beginning of the season is the primrose.

In June we were in the wood with a friend who has a good macro camera. He photographed a bee that we think is a white-bellied mining bee, Andrena gravida. This is quite an exciting bee for the UK:

Tree bumblebees built a nest in one of the bird boxes this year:

In August I photographed a most peculiar-looking fly – the waisted bee-grabber, Physocephala rufipes, which is shown below:

This pellucid hoverfly, Volucella pellucens, seen in August and looking very much like Humpty Dumpty, is also a fly but its shape couldn’t be more different to the waisted bee-grabber:

There are always lots of bizarre-looking scorpion flies to be seen in the marjoram clearing in the summer:

We often find glow-worm larvae in the wood, such as this one seen in June:

Another thing on the agenda for 2026 is to visit the wood just after dark on a warm, still evening in June or July. This is in hope of seeing adult female glow-worms advertising their position to the males by glowing in the undergrowth.

My final photo is of one of the many white helleborines, a woodland specialist orchid, that appeared this May:

We would normally expect to find one or two white helleborines in the wood each spring, but this year was an extraordinary year for them and we found at least forty.

It was been another wonderful year of discovery in the wood. We are hoping to get some clearing and coppicing work done this winter and then will wait to see what 2026 brings. A very Happy New Year to you.

Local Wildlife Sites are areas of land that have been identified as being especially important for wildlife and its habitats, and there are almost five hundred of them in Kent and forty thousand of them across England. They can be both public and private land which supports biodiversity, provides corridors and acts as a buffer to protect nature from surrounding land use.

The number of Local Wildlife Sites so far across England is broken down by area below:

And the percentage of land per area that is part of a Local Wildlife Site is shown here:

On Monday we had the fantastic news that, with much help from Kent Wildlife Trust, the meadows have now been designated a Local Wildlife Site, as an extension to the existing Kingsdown and Walmer Beach Local Wildlife Site. Nothing much will change as a result, but it is a wonderful grande finale for the year.

I have to admit that the allotment ran away with us this summer and got wildly out of control. We are weeding and composting it now, so that we can start afresh next year with renewed good intentions. One day Dave half-weeded one of the raised beds, intending to finish it off the next day. In the morning we noticed large feathers on the soil and, without investigating too closely, supposed that a pigeon had come down to peck around the newly overturned soil and fallen victim to a sparrowhawk.

When Dave returned to finish the weeding, though, he was very surprised to find a large duck-sized bird that was now buried just below the soil, which had then been beautifully smoothed back over. The bird had no head or feet so we are not completely sure what species it is – I think it was probably a duck though:

We had never stumbled upon a fox’s cache before. I read that they do bury excess food and usually take great care to disguise high protein prey such as this bird. Interestingly, when a fox returns to remove the cache, it will often urinate at the site as a kind of bookkeeping exercise so that it will know that it has emptied the cache even though it might still be able to smell the food.

I trained a trail camera onto the cache site and, two nights later, the fox retuned to collect the bird:

Although whether or not the bookkeeping urination occurred has not been recorded for prosperity by the camera.

John the bird ringer has been ringing in both the meadows and the wood recently. Rather extraordinarily, in the last three recent seasons in the meadows he has caught seven firecrests:

One of the firecrests was a retrap (now called a ‘subsequent encounter’). It had previously been ringed in the meadows on 28th November but had now put on a bit of weight and muscle. This is good news because it suggests that the firecrest is overwintering here and is doing very well on it.

He has also recently ringed several long-tailed tits in the meadows:

One of the long-tailed tits was also a subsequent encounter and has an amusing history. It was first ringed as a juvenile in June this year at Sandwich Bay Observatory just to the north of here. It was then recaught four times at the observatory – once in August, twice in September and once in October. You can imagine that perhaps it got a bit fed up with constantly finding itself in the ringers’ net and decided to move south to try its luck elsewhere, only to find itself once more in a net in the meadows. I wonder if we will see it again before too long?

It is unusual to catch a wren in the nets and it was lovely to see this one:

Lots of measurements and observations are made before a bird is ringed and released:

I did not know that you can sex a great tit by looking at the width of the black stripe down its front. This is a male with a wide black stripe and the female would have a much narrower one:

It is now thought that all the blackcaps that are here during the summer will then migrate south for the winter. They are soon replaced with other blackcaps from the more northerly parts of Europe, arriving in the autumn to overwinter in this country. John caught one of these overwintering blackcaps this week:

On a recent sunny day, we toured the meadows to clear old bird nests out of the nest boxes. It is sometimes a bit of a struggle to remember where all the boxes are, but we managed to find eight boxes that had been used this year:

Several of the boxes had been commandeered by snails to hibernate in:

A female gypsy moth had taken up residence in another box. Ignoring the snail, you can see the whole life cycle in the photo below. The hairy caterpillar is top right and the large, smooth brown cocoon is below it. The white flightless adult female is now deceased and lying just above the cocoon and snail. Finally, her brown furry egg mass is to the left of the photo:

Other interesting photos from the meadows this week:

I heard from our woodland neighbour that she had just seen a hawfinch in her wood. John the bird ringer was ringing in our wood the very next day but sadly didn’t see or hear a hawfinch. He did, however, hear crossbills throughout the morning. Eventually twenty-two of them landed in a nearby tree and he got fantastic views. He doesn’t carry a camera but here is a photo of two male crossbills from Wiki Commons:

Occasionally we do hear shooting in the environs of the wood and so perhaps these pheasants are seeking sanctuary amongst the trees where the guns can’t go:

The new pond in the marjoram clearing has been getting a lot of visitors recently. A sparrowhawk here:

And lots of night time woodcock:

Even a tawny owl is regularly bathing there still:

Tomorrow’s winter solstice is the very deepest point of winter and is always eagerly anticipated here. From that point on the days are gradually getting longer and there is an indefinable feeling of change in the air. Like our ancestors for centuries before us, we are planning to mark the day by lighting some candles out in the meadows, celebrating a special day where light starts to win out over the darkness.

Now that the wildlife is mostly tucked away for the winter and all is quiet out there, it is time to turn my attention to reviewing my wildlife highlights for 2025. It is truly a labour of love to trawl through the photos taken in the meadows and the wood over the past twelve months and come up with a selection of the most interesting. I will be using these in my reviews of the year coming soon! Before I start that, though, I first asked my family to send me their most memorable wildlife photo of the year. It was fun to see what they came up with, and I now present these to you here.

We have five children and I start with the youngest, Lizzie, who went truffle hunting with Gianfranco and his dog Mina in Piedmont, Northern Italy, in October.

Mina is a Lagotto Romagnolo, a breed of dog known as the best truffle hunters in the world, and she dug up four white truffles whilst Lizzie was with her. The truffle is the fruiting body of a fungus that grows underground, forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree roots. It needs to be eaten in order to disperse and so develops an appetising smell which gets stronger as it matures. By October, the aroma is detectable above ground by animals with a keen sense of smell such as badgers and wild boar. They will dig them up and eat them, then spread the truffle spores in their droppings.

Jonny, who moved to Brighton this autumn, took himself down to the seafront at dusk and captured the Brighton Piers’ starling murmuration on his phone.

Before they left for Brighton, our daughter-in-law Hayley got amazing video footage of up to ten red kites who came to tea in their back garden in Maidenhead after she had thrown some scraps out. Red kites generally feed by swooping low, grabbing the food with their feet and not landing on the ground. However, at Hayley’s red kite tea party that afternoon most of her visitors eventually landed down onto the lawn:

Our daughter Sally has sent this photo of a rose-crowned fruit dove that she thought was the most beautiful bird she’d ever seen. It lives high in the canopy of the rainforests of Northern and Eastern Australia and Southern Indonesia and eats various fruits from the trees and vines. This is not where she saw it though – she saw it in a zoo in Honfleur when she was on holiday with her family in France this summer:

Her husband Adam found a very large elephant hawk moth caterpillar in their garden in Kent in August. The species was apparently given this common name because of the caterpillar’s resemblance to an elephant’s trunk:

But when he gently nudged it with a twig, it rapidly transformed itself into something that looks a lot more scary:

Our other son Jonty, together with his wife Ellie, accompanied us to Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey back in January where we stayed overnight in shepherds huts in the heart of the reserve. We were most unfortunate though because Storm Herminia was in full swing whilst we were there, meaning that we saw very little wildlife and got very wet. By way of consolation, the wildlife guide showed us where there was a magnificent long-eared owl roosting in some deep cover. This is a bird that Jonty and Ellie had never seen and of which we had never before got such good views:

The four of us are going to try again and are returning to Elmley next month, hoping for better weather this time.

In the depths of December’s gloom, it is impossible not to be cheered by Ellie’s photo below of buff-tailed bumblebees. It was taken in July in the gardens of the large crop protection company she works for near Maidenhead:

Our eldest child Sarah moved with her family to Cornwall this summer. However, she and our little grandson stayed with us in Kent last week and visited Wingham Wildlife Park where a Bornean orangutang put on a good show for them:

All three species of orangutang are now critically endangered and zoo populations are crucial, serving as vital insurance populations and genetic reservoirs. They can also be used to raise awareness of the habitat loss due to palm oil plantations which is one of their biggest threats.

Sarah also took this photo on her phone of a hummingbird hawkmoth when visiting Trelissick gardens near Truro in Cornwall:

These lovely moths feed from the nectar of tube-shaped flowers, using their long proboscis and whilst hovering in the air – they are notoriously difficult to photograph and have frustrated me many times, even with the speed whacked right up on my camera.

We are looking forward to getting to know Cornwall’s distinctive wildlife a bit better as we visit Sarah and her family in the coming years.

My brother likes Cornwall too and he sent me this photo of a grey seal haul out on the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall in February. What a lovely sight this is:

He also took this photo of a grey heron from the back door of his home in Somerset:

His wife, Julie, found this beautiful moth, a scarlet tiger moth, in their Somerset garden in May. It has a largely westerly distribution and I haven’t ever seen one of these:

She also found a garden tiger moth caterpillar at Three Cliffs Bay on The Gower in South Wales in April. It looks really quite extraordinary, like a piece of old badger fur:

One of my brother’s sons is in a different league to the rest of the family as far as wildlife photography goes. He lived in the US for several years before moving back to England this summer. Before he left, he took this photo of a bull moose in the Rocky Mountains National Park, Colorado:

And this amazing photo is of a subadult grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming:

My sister’s wildlife photo of the year is of a lovely mallard’s nest that they found at the bottom of their garden in Berkshire this spring:

This was not an ideal spot for the mother duck to have chosen and they were worried about how she was going to lead her ducklings to the river once the eggs hatched. In the end, however, this wasn’t an issue because sadly the nest was abandoned.

My sister does have another wildlife photo, this time taken inside her house. Although this was actually in October 2024, it was so astonishing that I’ve included it anyway. She had the french windows open that day and a polecat wandered into her sitting room and had a poke around:

There are quite a lot of dogs in the family and one of my sister’s daughters actually now has three. Here is lovely little Skye who she took in to temporarily foster this year and of course ended up keeping her:

I finish this round up of my family’s wildlife year with Dave and my favourite photos. Back in May, we were with the Amphibian and Reptile Trust who were showing us the reptiles and amphibians of Dorset as part of a four day holiday. The smooth snake is Britain’s rarest snake and Dave never dreamed that he would ever see one, let alone actually hold one. This image of him with a smooth snake is his photo of the year:

Smooth snakes are only found on heathlands in Dorset, Hampshire and Surrey. It is a non-venomous constrictor, coiling up around its prey of sand lizards, slow-worms, insects and nestlings to subdue them, often crushing them to death.

In June we caught the sleeper up to Aberdeen and then the overnight ferry on to Shetland. The Shetland Isles are remote from the rest of the World and, as a result, some species have evolved in isolation and are now only found there. Before very long at all I had fallen in love with the Shetland bee:

Only found on Shetland and the Western Isles, the Shetland bee is strikingly large and intensely coloured, and is quite simply an absolute corker.

Shetland also has its own wren subspecies. Since there are so few trees to hide within on the islands, the Shetland wren is used to being out in the open and is easy to photograph:

This wren is darker than the mainland form with a longer bill and stronger legs.

I have very much enjoyed pulling together this collection of my family’s wildlife photographs for 2025. They should now be forewarned that I will be asking them again next year, so hopefully they will be ready with some more good ones!

John the bird ringer sent me this photo of a woodcock that his son had found resting on the deck of his ship, not far off the Norwegian coast.

 Although the woodcock is very obvious on the red deck of the ship, it is normally exquisitely camouflaged, disappearing from view when roosting by day on a leaf-strewn woodland floor.

There is a small population of woodcock that breed in this country but their numbers are boosted a hundredfold in the autumn when birds from north-east Europe and Russia arrive here to enjoy our milder winters. Every year a fair number come to our wood and we enjoy night time trail camera photos of them throughout the winter until they leave again in the spring.

Back in November 2018 Dave discovered that one of these lovely birds had flown in off the sea and unfortunately straight into his study window, breaking its neck. The fact that it had just arrived at its destination after a long and arduous journey across Europe and the North Sea made the whole thing even more sad.

The underside of a woodcocks tail feathers are very white indeed. In fact they are 30% brighter than the white on any other bird, since it uses them for courtship display at night. The grey upperside, however, ensures that its daytime camouflage is not compromised. Below you can see the grey upperside and the white underside of the tail feathers:

Although these overwintering birds won’t be displaying whilst in this country, I do have trail cameras footage of them flaring their tail up to reveal the white. Photos from February 2021 and March 2023:

Woodcock feed by probing their long beak into the soil and they would not survive if they stayed in colder climes where the ground will be frozen for most of the winter. This country, however, does have its own adverse weather from time to time and I love this photo from our wood in February 2021:

Blackbirds also arrive in the UK for the winter from the colder parts of Europe, boosting our resident population. There are five blackbirds in the photo below, taken this week in the wood, which is something that we would never see during the summer:

There has been a lot of rain and dull, grey days recently and these conditions are not good for the trail cameras. However, I have got the following photos of the birdlife of the meadows at this time of year:

An area of our back lawn between a cherry and an apple tree looks like it has been keeping the badgers entertained:

Badgers are omnivores, eating a wide range of different foods, but they particularly like to dig in the soil for worms and other invertebrates such as leatherjackets and beetle grubs. The roots of the trees create a more complex soil structure and this area will no doubt be harbouring more insects and grubs than other parts of the lawn

We have a trail camera looking at a badger tunnel entrance on the steep cliff below the meadows. Recently there have been a lot of photos of badgers emerging from this hole and hardly any of them going in. I am taking this as evidence that this low tunnel is connected to the rest of the sett further up the slope:

At the bottom of the cliff is the beach and over the years we have lots of photos of foxes carrying fish. A fox this week has got itself a dogfish, which it has carried back up the cliff and is about to go under the fence and into the meadows with it:

The candlesnuff fungus, Xylaria hypoxylon, that we have growing in the meadows this winter, is one of the very few British fungi to show bioluminescence, although it glows too weakly to be detected by the human eye:

Over in the wood there has been another sighting of an unknown mustelid:

I presume that this is the same animal that our woodland neighbours caught on their trail cameras last month:

I was in Maidenhead in Berkshire again recently and went on a birdwatching trip to the nearby Little Marlow gravel pit. It is always refreshing to see birds there that I wouldn’t normally see at home:

I finish this week with the absolutely gorgeous Willesborough Windmill near Ashford. We recently accompanied our train-mad young grandson to an exhibition by the Ashford Model Railway Club which was being held in a barn alongside the mill. This windmill, which can still grind flour, is really close to the M20 motorway but we had never spotted it before or known that it existed:

The mill is open to the public on summer weekends and we have put it onto our To Do list for 2026.

There can be something so dreary about the short, damp days of November and we like to get away if we can. Last week we joined a four day Naturetrek holiday based in the South Devon fishing town of Brixham, looking for what wildlife the region can offer in mid November:

Our home for the trip was the friendly Berry Head Hotel, situated near the end of Berry Head Penninsula and looking across Tor Bay and out to sea:

A number of grey seals regularly lounge around in Brixham harbour and we could hear their ethereal singing all the way along the headland at our hotel:

I took a lot of photos of them:

Each of the seals has distinctive markings and can be individually identified by the Seal Project, a charity that monitors and protects the seals of South Devon.

A few purple sandpipers spend the winter on the harbour’s breakwater every year:

And several rock pipits were also poking around the seaweed on the breakwater:

Brixham still has a busy fishing port and a lot of the vessels are beam trawlers such as BM-15 below. The wheeled beam and some of the net has been hauled up here so that we can see it:

Not knowing much about fishing, I found this diagram below helpful in understanding what was going on:

A lot of rusty old beams from the trawlers are stored on a jetty off the breakwater and apparently these are still sometimes used:

South Devon is the best place in the country to see cirl bunting. In 1991 this species was on the absolute brink of extinction in the UK with just a hundred pairs remaining in South Devon. But since then there has been an enormous effort to turn their fortunes around. Happily, by 2016 there were 1078 pairs – mainly still in South Devon but also now including a small population further west in Cornwall where they have been reintroduced. Hopefully the number will be even larger when the next count is done. We went up onto Berry Head to see some cirl bunting coming down to seed that is put out for them:

Mike, our guide for the trip, has been birding in the region his whole life and had been the Devon county bird recorder for a decade. We met people he knew wherever we went which was very nice. He is also an artist and the bird illustrations in RSPB and other bird hides across the country are all his:

The four day Naturetrek holiday included three boat trips – one on the deep waters of the Dart estuary, the second on the shallow, muddy Exe Estuary and the final one around Tor Bay.

There are so many lovely rivers in South Devon. The Dart rises high on Dartmoor and then flows forty-seven miles through south Devon down to the sea at Dartmouth. But the last road bridge is at Totnes, six miles inland, and below there you will need to use a ferry to get across the river. The Lower Ferry operates between Dartmouth and Kingswear near the mouth of the river. It is basically an unpowered pontoon that is pushed and pulled along by a tug boat:

The Higher Ferry, slightly to the north, travels across the river on a cable:

The Mew Stone projects from the sea just beyond the mouth of the Dart. We saw a grey seal that had got itself a long way up the rock and would now presumably have to wait for a high tide to get safely back down again:

It did look a bit sad:

I was pleased to see a shag and a cormorant together on the Mew Stone so that I could revise the difference between them:

Gulls around the Mew Stone:

The Mew Stone presents quite a hazard to shipping and there are navigational buoys guarding it. The day after our River Dart boat trip we had distant views back to the rock from Slapton Sands and we were amazed and delighted to spot our old friend THV Patricia working on the Mew Stone buoys. We often see her maintaining the light vessel and buoys that guard the perilous Goodwin Sands back home and it felt slightly disorientating to stumble across her somewhere else:

Along with her sister ship, Galatea, she is operated by Trinity House, responsible for the lighthouses, light vessels and navigational buoys around the English and Welsh coast.

One day we caught the Higher Ferry across the Dart in the minibus and drove down to Slapton Sands:

It was the site of a terrible disaster in April 1944 when Exercise Tiger, a large-scale rehearsal for the Normandy Invasion, was taking place there. As well as there being a friendly fire incident where hundreds of men were accidentally killed on the beach, the rehearsal was also attacked by fast German E-boats. Four ships loaded with tanks and men were hit or sunk. The total death toll of American servicemen during Exercise Tiger was an appalling 946.

Start Point lies at the southern end of Slapton Sands:

Although it was a very windy day, we made a diversion to the exposed Start Point because we could see lots of gannets diving into the turbulent waters there.

The birds were after the garfish which gather at Start Point:

The gannets were not the only ones after the garfish though. As we stood and watched, we could see several Atlantic bluefin tuna surfacing as they hunted the garfish from below. The tuna are up to two metres long and have returned to UK waters in recent years after decades of absence. It was so exciting to see them – the highlight of the trip for me, although I am afraid that I didn’t manage to get a photo of them to show you.

From Start Point, we could see the remains of the village of Hallsands at the bottom the cliffs:

In 1891 the village had a population of 159, living in 37 houses and with a chapel and a pub called The London Inn. Most of the villagers depended on crab fishing on the sand and shingle banks out to sea that also protected the village from easterly storms. But in the 1890s it was decided to expand the Naval Dockyard near Plymouth and large amounts of sand and gravel were dredged offshore from Hallsands for the construction of the docks. But with reduced protection from its sandbanks, parts of the village started to get damaged by storms and, in 1902, the dredging licence was revoked. However, it was already too late. On 26 January 1917 a storm effectively destroyed the entire village and, by the end of that year, only one house remained habitable.

It was a very cold day for our trip up the Exe estuary. Around a thousand dark-bellied brent geese overwinter on the estuary, arriving there every autumn from Siberia:

The four geese in the centre of the photo below are juveniles with parallel white lines on their wings:

On the final day of the trip we had a most enjoyable trip around Tor Bay on a lovely sunny November day. We saw at least four great northern divers out in the bay:

And a peregrine falcon on the cliffs:

There is a mussel farm close to Brixham harbour, as well as this oyster farm further out into the bay:

I have a soft spot for herring gulls and we had a close encounter with quite a large group of them out in Tor Bay. The skipper threw some bread from the boat and in no time at all we were being hotly pursued:

It was an amazing sight:

Since they were keeping pace with the moving boat, it was easy to take photos of them in flight:

This adult had a very full crop:

A juvenile with the urban sprawl around Tor Bay:

There was some in-flight bickering:

But they were willing to put in a lot of effort just to claim a crust of white bread:

I have probably included more herring gull photos than I should, but it was a fantastic sight and I can’t make a decision on which to leave out:

We had had a great time in South Devon, seeing and learning a lot. Despite a poor weather forecast it actually scarcely rained at all and, although it was certainly cold and windy at times, we consider ourselves very fortunate. After the trip we headed even further west to Cornwall to spend a few days with one of our daughters and her family who have recently moved to the lovely town of Perranporth on the north coast.

It had already been a boat-heavy week with three boat trips and an admiration of the Brixham fishing fleet, but we rounded this off with a visit to the excellent National Maritime Museum in Falmouth. They have so many interesting vessels on display there, presented in a user-friendly way:

But all this was a long way from home. It was a seven hour drive back, which featured good road conditions and only three short stops. A lengthy journey indeed but one that, with a daughter now in Cornwall, we will be doing more frequently in the coming years: